Trinkets, pretty trinkets

Skadi the Ruthless finally dropped his shiny drake for me the other day. Months of farming = worth it.

On the other hand, I’ve been killing Anzu for about the last four years and haven’t seen a god damn thing.

I take back what I said about Tyrande’s Favourite Doll being useless. Decent healing trinkets are pretty hard to come by these days if you’re not a raider [or haven’t been since tier 11]. The healing trinkets from Firelands and DS are fantastic, but the designers seem really reluctant to provide anything decent in Heroics or as a Valor/rep reward. It’s all rng haste procs, mastery, spell power and other stats which are not Intellect.

What I’m only just kind of realising is that trinkets are the slot for which item level is least relevant. For any other piece of armour or weapon, the item level directly dictates how much of your primary stat will appear, or the damage / spell power on the weapon; so 95% of the time higher ilevel is better. Trinkets are completely different in that they may not even have a primary stat on them [usually terrible], or may have a proc which blows anything else out of the water, even multiple tiers later.

For example, this weekend a fellow raider of mine was grumbling about how he still had to use DMC Volcano as he had yet to find a better trinket in three raiding tiers. I told him that’s the epeen talking.

Tank trinkets for tier 13 are a really good example of this. The BiS pair from tier 12 were both excellent:– static mastery with a below 35% melee hit absorb proc– static dodge with an on-use 20% damage reduction absorb

*can proc from incidental damage and thus the size of the bubble is subject to RNG

Even deciding what stats are worth having is debatable these days. Everyone knows how valuable getting to CTC is, but past that point opinion varies wildly. I’ve been regemming for Stamina past CTC, but there are still plenty of idiots who think that stamina is worthless for all tanks in all situations and are not afraid to voice this opinion as fact.

And I’ve yet to see a clear conclusion on the value of Mastery past CTC. The least dumb-sounding people on forums seem to have evidence that it’s a two-roll system, which basically means that crit block gets pushed off the table along with regular block, so Mastery will only become less valuable the more avoidance we have past CTC.

What I think I’ll do is gem for CTC with one Mastery trinket, probably Spindle because the below 35% bubble is fairly universal in its usefulness, and swap the other trinket depending on what the encounter requires.